Brian Freemantle: Comrade Charlie

Charlie Muffin was surprised to feel as uncomfortable as he did. The need for self-preservation normally overcame all scruples and Charlie was convinced he needed all the self-protection he could get, or manipulate from wherever he could get it. Since when had he been bothered by scruples anyway? He reckoned he’d lost them around the same time as he’d lost his tonsils, when he was about eleven. Too late to back off now: he was committed. Necessarily committed.

‘Lovely place,’ said Laura.

‘Got a great write-up in one of the Sunday food sections,’ smiled Charlie. How much had the proprietor slipped the lying bugger to write that this was the most exciting eatery in London? On the standard so far he’d probably had to throw his virgin sister in, to swing it. It was a place of pinewood, checked table-cloths and waiters who wore earrings, jammed with yelling, table-swopping people all of whom seemed to know each other but be unable to speak at any sound level less than a hundred decibels. And the food was crap: Charlie was currently undecided whether his salmon had died from decaying old age or from botulism with a distinctive mercury flavour. The botulism was favourite.

‘I read it,’ said the girl. ‘Never guessed I’d get here. Or be with you when I did.’

Charlie searched for a gallant reply. ‘I’m glad you’re enjoying it,’ he said, which wasn’t it. She didn’t seem to notice. If they waited for the wine waiter to do his job they’d both die from dehydration, providing the fish didn’t get them first. Charlie finished off the bottle of Puligny Montrachet between them and returned the bottle neck-down in the cooler, as a hopeful distress signal. Maybe he should have attached a white flag.

‘Do you want to know a secret?’

‘If you like,’ accepted Charlie. It was to hear any secrets she might have — and to feed back as much disinformation as he could plant in her mind — that Charlie was spending an arm and a leg on a disgusting meal in a place where he could hardly hear himself think. He pushed the fish away, halfeaten. Definitely mercury-tasting botulism. He remembered hearing from someone in the Technical Sections where they actually invented assassination methods that the most virulent killer toxins were still made from fish.

‘The girls at the office were jealous when I told them where we were going!’ announced Laura.

He knew he was expected to flatter her back, like he would be expected to do others things, later. Survival time, sunshine, he told himself: everything’s allowed, to survive. He said: ‘I can’t understand why they should be!’ and thought: Oh Christ! It sounded like he was enjoying it and wanted more: like he was an absolute prick, in fact.

‘Can’t you?’ she said, even more coquettish. ‘No one seems to understand you, Charlie. And there are stories! Intriguing ones.’

Like what the hell was he doing in intelligence at all, the uninvited interloper who wouldn’t take the hint that he wasn’t wanted. It had been all right under a couple of Directors General but since Sir Alistair Wilson’s collapse he didn’t have the protection at the top any more. Rather, he had the complete reverse. Charlie paraded the rehearsed response, even to someone who worked in the department and was a signatory to the Official Secrets Act, although he hoped Laura wouldn’t let that get in the way too much tonight. He said: ‘Fairy-tale stuff. We’re all just clerks.’

She grinned knowingly. ‘Clerks don’t break spy rings and go in and out of the Eastern bloc on false passports and have a biography in Records labelled “Director General Eyes Only”.’

The turn in Charlie’s stomach might just have been the fish but he didn’t think so. Encouragingly he said: ‘Sounds as if you’ve been checking.’

‘Maybe someone has,’ said Laura. She was secretary to Richard Harkness, who hated his guts more than the lousy fish appeared to do and who’d been acting Director General since Wilson’s illness.

‘How many guesses do I get?’

‘I don’t think you’d need a lot,’ said the girl. ‘Why does Harkness shit on you so much?’

‘Face doesn’t fit, I guess,’ said Charlie, casually, not wanting her to guess what the evening was all about because that would be cruel. He said: ‘You think that’s what he does, shits on me?’

‘Come on , darling!’ said Laura. ‘You’ve been assigned nothing but Dog Watch stuff since Harkness has been in charge! I frankly don’t know how you’ve put up with it like you have!’

Charlie noted he had become darling to Laura. He said: ‘Someone’s got to do the menial jobs.’

Laura cocked her head to one side, smiling quizzically. ‘I’m not buying that, Charlie Muffin. That’s not your style.’

‘Maybe that’s the problem,’ said Charlie. ‘I haven’t got any style.’

‘I think he’s trying to make life so unpleasant that you’ll quit,’ declared Laura. ‘Either that or get you fired.’

Then Harkness would need to try a bloody sight harder, thought Charlie. He’d endured four months so far: four months as nothing more than the clerk he’d just told Laura he was, checking long-ago and out-of-date records for revelations the trained analysts might have missed, poring over airport and port immigrant entries for false passport trails that would have been cold anyway, reading the translations — when translations had been necessary — of Eastern bloc publications to detect policy changes which the Foreign Office had an entire division to work on. Charlie felt he was atrophying, gradually turning into a fossil, like something in a natural history museum, a frozen-in-stone example of something that had roamed the earth a million years before. But if it meant defeating Richard St John Harkness, Charlie knew he’d go on for another four months or four years or for ever: he’d been fucked over by experts and Harkness certainly wasn’t an expert. Charlie said: ‘I guess there might be a way but I don’t think Harkness knows where to find it.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘That I’m not going to make it easy for him.’

‘You know how many new Conduct Rules and Regulations he’s introduced since he’s been in charge? Every one of which I’ve had to write up and get legally phrased!’ demanded Laura, outraged.

‘No,’ said Charlie, who’d memorized every one because failure to observe some bloody absurd dictum or other was precisely the sort of thing that Harkness would try to invoke against him.

‘Fifteen!’ said Laura. ‘The man should have been a lawyer!’

‘He is,’ disclosed Charlie, whose personal rules insisted that he always know everything about his enemies. ‘He studied finance law at Oxford: that’s why he’s so good at cutting expenses.’

‘Which you don’t get any more,’ reminded Laura, painfully.

‘It’ll pass,’ said Charlie unconvincingly.

‘Would it really hurt so much to show some respect, to his face at least?’ urged Laura. ‘He is the Director General now.’

‘ Acting ,’ qualified Charlie instantly. And it would hurt to show respect to an asshole like Harkness: hurt like hell.

‘He’s out to get you, Charlie. He’s going to invent so much red tape he’ll strangle you with it.’

‘Or himself.’

‘He’s the boss , for Christ’s sake! He can make the rules. Change the goalposts whenever he wants to.’